


The Weight of Gold

by A_Beautiful_Irony



Category: Captive Prince - C. S. Pacat
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Daydreams, Laurent POV, Longing and Regret, M/M, Requited Love, The gold cuffs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-11
Updated: 2018-09-11
Packaged: 2019-07-10 21:55:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15958307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Beautiful_Irony/pseuds/A_Beautiful_Irony
Summary: “You should give me the other,” Laurent had said. He hadn’t meant it to be like this.





	The Weight of Gold

Laurent schooled his expression into a hard mask as the gold cuff closed around his wrist. The pain of the moment was personal, and too close. 

He remembered his words from a lifetime ago. “You should give me the other,” he’d said. He had not meant it to be like this. 

Laurent tried not to think about how he had meant it to be. How he’d imagined it in his head, a quiet moment shared between the two of them, and only the two of them. Laurent had claimed he would not wear it, but that hadn’t stopped him from envisioning it: 

Damen’s smile winking in the candlelight, helping Laurent close the latch, the glinting gold snapping shut with a sound oddly exhilarating in its finality. The quick flash of exchanged grins, a meeting of gazes, and perhaps the soft brush of Damen’s lips against the metal or across Laurent’s pale knuckles. And then the shirt sleeve, laced briskly back up to cover the illicit object, followed by the jacket, perhaps rushed at the sound of someone’s unexpected approach. 

Now he was seated beside Damen, the two of them straining the limits of their iron wills to keep from looking at one another. Laurent nearly flinched at the disgust and pain evident in the rigid posture of the man with whom he had so recently shared his body, his mind. His innermost self.

It hurt. It hurt.

And what hurt the most, what ached like a wound in Laurent’s chest, right beside the sharp, lingering ache in his shoulder, was the knowledge that Laurent chose this. He’d chosen for Damen and himself, had taken the choice away.

Faced with his unforgivable failure to appear on the field at Charcy, Laurent had thought it would be simpler this way; Damianos, returning victorious and furious from battle, would be met with all the cold ruthlessness he should have expected from a traitorous Veretian prince. Laurent would play the part - had played it beautifully, though it had turned his stomach and bitten deep into his heart to say the words. 

He’d been angry enough. He’d meant them. Most of them. 

He had wanted this. Almost. 

It was safer this way, safer for Damianos. Laurent had hoped it might be safer for himself as well. That hope, however, was proved more false with every breath Damen took beside him, every tiny shift of his weight. Laurent felt each one as if they were his own. As though they were one, still wrapped up in one another’s bodies in the sheets at Ravenel, breathing each other’s air.

He wanted that back, desperately. As it was, he found himself constantly watching Damen from the corner of his eye, though never meeting his gaze. He caught each time Damen looked his way, sidelong and reluctant. Laurent cherished every longing look, every change in Damen’s expression, each one a jewel that Laurent would keep locked away forever in his frigid heart. In the months and years to come, if he made it that far, he could take them carefully out and savor them in times of weakness.

He would do anything to run his hands through those dark curls again. Pull that beautiful, too-honest face down to Laurent’s level, angle his own face just so… 

But no. It was done and he would follow through. He was hurting Damen, and that knowledge hurt like a blade between his ribs. But he would make Damen forget him, even if he had to wrench his own heart from his chest to do it. Because the alternative was worse. 

Because Damen in love made mistakes. With Jokaste, with Kastor. 

With Laurent. 

Damen would do anything to forward Laurent’s goals, even at the expense of his own. Laurent had seen him do it time and again: 

As a slave in an enemy prince’s bedroom, against three armed men, Damen had fought almost without thought, protecting Laurent as though on pure instinct; Then as a soldier, fighting alongside him for Laurent’s throne, when he certainly would have been better served escaping and taking back his own; And most recently, at Charcy, as a King leading his men into battle at Laurent’s request, and watching them fall, and fall, and fall, because he had taken Laurent, in blind faith, at his word. 

“Trust me,” he had said. And Damen had trusted him.

Laurent swallowed hard against the nausea. Charcy, Charcy. 

He relived the battle he had not seen, in his head, men dying all around and Damen, covered in blood, the evidence of massacre, scanning the battlefield, still faithfully, stupidly certain that Laurent would somehow appear. 

The thought was sickening, and as Laurent listened to Damen espouse the merits of their great alliance, he concentrated all his efforts on keeping that telltale muscle in his jaw from overworking.

Damen would see it. Damen would know.

And Damen could not know, not after everything Laurent had done to him. Damen would give up everything he had worked for, and Laurent could not, would not allow that to happen. Not after everything. Not anymore. 

*** 

Later, in the tense space that opened up around Makedon’s hunger for a fight, Laurent felt his gaze ice over. 

He said, innocently, “But we are brothers.” And as he shared a split second of eye contact with Damen, he forced himself not to stare, not to gaze into those beautiful, deeply familiar eyes. Brown as his hair, warm as the sun, open and honest and thoughtlessly, irrationally kind. The barest of glances. Laurent looked away. 

But that was all they needed - their understanding of one another so deep as to be a means of communication all its own. Wordlessly, and without looking at one another again, the two monarchs reached their hands out toward one another, now both encased in damning, heavy gold, and threaded their fingers together. Light against dark, perfectly balanced. 

The image reminded Laurent suddenly, viscerally, of another scene he had imagined: the two of them strolling, impossibly, through the gardens and corridors of Arles, grinning at each other like fools. Sharing conspiratorial looks as they walked together hand in hand, fingers twined just like this, and the glint of gold slipping from beneath Laurent’s tight laced sleeve. They would leave whispers and scandalized expressions in their wake as courtiers began to catch them out. 

The thought had made Laurent laugh when he had first envisioned it, had made him practically giddy at the the image, and all that it implied. 

Now, if Laurent could have laughed, it would have come out bitter and cracked. 

He watched their hands, still entwined for however brief a moment, on the armrests of their twin battlefield thrones. And it occurred to Laurent that this was the first time he had touched Damen since the morning he had ridden off to claim Fortaine. Since he had left Damen and his army to fight and die in Laurent’s battle at Charcy, while Laurent sat unconscious in a cell after failing to predict what should have been an obvious ambush. 

That had, Laurent thought, also been the last time Damen had touched him in something like intimacy. As he had seen Laurent off on his merry way to the greatest blunder of his life. They had held hands then, too. As friends. As more than friends. 

“Friends. Is that what we are?” Laurent had said that too. That night. 

As their fingers parted and they stood to face the assembled armies, Laurent permitted himself one final glance at the man beside him. 

It was a mistake. 

Damen looked perfect, completely in his element. Laurent had known he would be, had known he would take to kingship like a fish to water. This, Laurent thought, was what a trueborn King looked like. Damen was all broad shoulders and deep, commanding voice, booming out across the landscape with tact and intelligence. Laurent could see that Damen’s words had moved almost all of his men, some doubtlessly to their very souls. 

They were, Laurent also thought, not the only ones whose souls the true King of Akielos had touched. 

In that moment, Laurent wanted to reach out his hand again, to watch Damen startle and turn, to pull Damen back toward him and bask in his glow. He wanted more than anything to — 

Laurent tore his eyes from Damianos’ shining form, turning instead toward his own impeccable camp. He took the first steps toward his own tent, his legs heavy. 

Laurent would not let himself think about what he wanted.

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you think! This was just a quick idea I had and couldn’t get out of my head.


End file.
